And so it starts with a couple of simple Tweets. One from us. One from them. It's a dichotomous relationship in Twitter Land, and the real world. Like the relationships between labor and management, or customer and staff.

Whether we're on vacation or not, short of the tips we leave behind for some, we often take for granted the personnel and staffers who tend to our needs. They make our lives simpler and more pleasurable. Additionally, in many cases, they make things safer.

You know them. They're the wait staff, porters, attendants, housekeeping staff, and maintenance people. We leave our work behind, or at least hope to, and in the process of escaping, we enter their work world. If they do their jobs right, we will barely notice them. In fact, the times we do take notice is when they provide exceptionally good service, or extremely poor service.

Poor service, you may have noticed, usually comes from those staffers who just aren't very happy with their work. There can be a couple of reasons for this. One could be that the staffer wouldn't be happy no matter what they were involved in. The second could be where work has become intolerable. The first has to do with personality. The second has to do with working conditions. And that involves management.

We're certain any management type can understand what we're addressing here. They have seen good and bad service in their lives. They know the difference. They too, like everyone involved, want to be served by happy, beautiful, quality people -- no matter what.

Just in case you're wondering about the quality, and beauty of Teamsters Local Union 31 members, the Rocky Mountaineer employees, just look at the article from Jenny Uechi, Managing Editor of The Vancouver Observer. A picture is worth a thousand words, and there are nine pictures there. (Sorry we missed that event!)

Final analysis: An employee lock out, in our opinion, is not a good negotiation strategy. It tends to irk those involved, customers included, and makes management look like something one would want to scrape off the bottom of a shoe.

Thank you for taking the time to educate yourself on what is happening at Rocky Mountaineer and sharing it with others.

The locked-out attendants include a mother of three that is facing eviction and being housed in emergency shelter in a matter of days. I know anything anyone does to help shine light on what is happening is greatly appreciated by them.